The darkness wasn’t empty.

That was the first lie my mind tried to tell me.

I stood inside it—no ground beneath my feet, no sky above my head—just pressure. Not crushing, not violent. Expectant. Like something vast holding its breath.

Then the eyes opened.

Red.

Not two. Not many. A presence shaped like sight itself. The glow didn’t illuminate anything; it erased it. The darkness didn’t retreat—it submitted.

I tried to move. My body didn’t respond.

The roar came next.

Not sound. Impact.

It tore through whatever boundary separated thought from instinct. It vibrated through my bones, through memory, through places in my mind I’d never given a name to. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t hunger.

It was acknowledgment.

You are seen.

The pressure intensified, the red deepened, and something ancient leaned closer—not to threaten, not to intimidate, but to confirm.

Then—

I inhaled sharply and sat upright, muscles coiling, hand snapping toward the space where my rifle should have been.

Nothing.

Just darkness. Real darkness this time. The warehouse ceiling above me. The distant hum of generators. My own breathing, fast and uneven.

My heart pounded like it was trying to break free of my chest.

The roar still echoed—not in my ears, but in my spine.

Correction has resumed.

I wiped sweat from my face and turned my head.

Asia was asleep beside me.

Or as close to sleep as she ever got.

Her body was still, but tension lived in her even now. One arm curled beneath her head, the other resting loosely against my side, fingers twitching occasionally like she was bracing for something even in rest. Dark circles shadowed her eyes. She looked worn down in a way no amount of training could hide.

I watched her for a long moment.

She’d carried too much lately. We all had. But she bore it quietly—like if she didn’t name the weight, it couldn’t crush her.

I leaned down and pressed a kiss to her forehead.

She murmured something unintelligible but didn’t wake.

“Get some rest,” I whispered, more to myself than to her.

I checked the time.

3:45 a.m.

The world was quiet in that specific way that only exists before dawn. Not peaceful. Just paused.

I slid out of bed without making a sound.

⸻

Cold air slapped me awake the moment I stepped outside.

Black hoodie. Black sweats. Running shoes.

No armor. No weapons.

Just me.

The city hadn’t woken yet. Streetlights buzzed faintly. Pavement glistened with old rain. I started running.

Five miles wasn’t about distance. It was about rhythm. Breath. Control.

My feet struck the ground in steady cadence as warehouses, alleys, and empty streets blurred past. Muscles warmed. Lungs burned. Thoughts sharpened.

The roar tried to creep back in.

I outran it.

By mile three, pain took over. Honest pain. Measurable pain. The kind you could work through.

By mile five, my mind was quiet.

I slowed to a walk, sweat soaking through my hoodie, chest rising and falling steadily.

Alive. Awake. Focused.

Good.

⸻

The weight room smelled like iron and oil.

I loaded the bar without ceremony.

Squat.

Five hundred pounds settled across my shoulders like a challenge. I dropped low, drove upward, legs screaming. Again. Again. Again.

Bench next. Two twenty-five. Controlled. Precise.

Deadlift.

Eight fifty.

The bar groaned as I pulled. My back locked in. Every muscle in my body fired at once. The floor felt too fragile beneath me.

Power cleans finished it. Three fifty. Explosive. Violent. Clean.

Four sets. Twenty-five reps each.

By the end, my hands shook. Sweat dripped onto the concrete. My vision tunneled.

I didn’t stop.

Pull-ups. Pushups. Sit-ups.

Pain layered over pain until nothing else existed.

When I finally stood still, chest heaving, I felt grounded again.

Whatever I’d heard in my sleep—whatever had reached out across distance and time—it didn’t own me.

Not yet.

⸻

The shower burned my skin red.

I stood under the water longer than necessary, letting heat loosen muscles, letting steam blur the edges of thought. When I stepped out, the sun still hadn’t risen.

Black tank. Black joggers. Slides.

War clothes later.

The work area of the warehouse came alive as I powered up my computer. Screens lit the space in pale blue and white. Maps. Feeds. Logs.

Little Rock unfolded in layers.

I marked safe zones. Dead zones. Abandoned structures. Routes that cameras missed. Places where people disappeared and no one asked why.

Then something snagged my attention.

A corporate logo.

Clean. Minimal. Too clean.

Crowhaven Cybersecurity Solutions.

My fingers hovered over the keyboard.

I opened the file.

Owner: Mara Voss.

The name hit harder than I expected.

Japan flashed behind my eyes—the camp. Cold mornings. Live-fire drills. Bodies dropping in training exercises meant to break us down to something useful.

Mara had never raised her voice. Never boasted. She smiled when systems failed. When locks opened that shouldn’t. When people realized too late they were compromised.

She’d graduated with us.

And now she was here.

Arkansas’s largest cybersecurity agency. Government contracts. Corporate security. Public face spotless enough to eat off.

I dug deeper.

And deeper.

What I found didn’t surprise me.

Breaches no one officially acknowledged. Intelligence networks quietly rerouted. Black-site communications interrupted at critical moments. Prison extractions that never happened—except they did.

That was just her keyboard work.

Field reports told the rest of the story.

Convoys stalled at the wrong moment. Communications dead zones that appeared and vanished like ghosts. Search-and-rescue missions redirected into failure.

Mara Voss didn’t pull triggers.

She decided who got to pull them.

I wrote down her location.

That was when I felt movement behind me.

“Working early,” Asia said.

I turned.

She leaned against the wall, wearing one of my shirts and my boxers, arms crossed loosely. Her eyes were sharp despite the fatigue. Always alert. Always watching.

“Always,” I said.

She crossed the room and stood behind me, hands settling on my shoulders. Warm. Solid. Real.

“What kind of work?” she asked.

I told her everything.

Mara. The camp. The agency. The money.

Asia listened without interrupting. When I finished, her hands tightened slightly.

“Why does she matter now?” she asked.

“She worked with Star,” I said. “If anyone knows her long game, it’s Mara.”

Asia exhaled slowly. “That’s dangerous.”

“So is guessing.”

She leaned in, kissed my cheek once. “Then we do it smart.”

Kelo cooked like nothing in the world was ending—eggs, toast, coffee. Lina and Asia organized gear. Jayla sat cross-legged with her laptop, already deep into something illegal.

I pulled Jayla aside, away from the others, past the stacks of crates and weapon cases until the warehouse noise thinned into a low mechanical hum.

“I need intel,” I said.

She didn’t look up from her laptop. Just smiled—small, knowing.

“Already running it.”

Numbers flooded her screen in cascading columns, white and green against black. Financial ledgers. Transfer routes. Corporate shells stacked inside corporate shells. Jayla’s fingers moved like she was playing something only she could hear.

“Her finances don’t line up,” Jayla said. “Not even close.”

“How bad?” I asked.

She rotated the screen toward me.

“Monthly deposits. Four-point-five million. Sometimes a little more. Sometimes a little less. But always there.” Her voice hardened. “Four years straight. No misses. No delays.”

I clenched my jaw.

“Side businesses?” I asked.

“Hotels. Nightclubs. Restaurants. A private security firm that bills triple market value.” Jayla finally glanced up at me. “Textbook laundering. Clean enough to pass audits. Dirty enough to move nations.”

“And the source?”

She highlighted a chart. Red lines bloomed outward like veins.

“Cocaine shipments moving north and east. Weapons trafficking layered underneath—military-grade. Distribution spikes across Arkansas and neighboring states.” She exhaled through her nose. “Someone’s been feeding the state poison with surgical precision.”

Star.

I felt it without saying her name. The structure. The patience. The cruelty masked as order.

“I’m visiting her,” I said.

Jayla stopped typing.

Slowly, she leaned back in her chair and studied me—not as an analyst, not as a hacker, but as a person trying to read the man standing in front of her.

“She’s fortified,” she said. “Private contractors. Redundant systems. Dead zones. Counter-surveillance. You don’t just walk into a place like that.”

“I don’t need easy,” I replied.

Her lips twitched, half a smile, half something else.

“That’s what scares me,” she said quietly.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. The screens hummed between us, data still flowing, numbers that represented blood and bodies and time running out.

Jayla stood.

She crossed the short distance between us and reached into her workstation, pulling out a small device—smooth, matte, no markings. It sat in her palm like it didn’t want to be noticed.

“Invisible drone,” she said casually, like she was offering a pen.

I stared at it. “How?”

“Camouflage algorithms inspired by animals,” she said. “Cephalopods. Insects. Predators that survive by never being seen.” She hesitated, then added, “Nature’s smarter than engineers.”

I took the device from her hand. Our fingers brushed.

She didn’t pull away right away.

“You know,” Jayla said, softer now, “most people don’t inspire this level of effort from me.”

I looked at her. “You saying I’m special?”

She huffed a quiet laugh. “I’m saying you’re… difficult to ignore.”

Her eyes dropped for half a second, then came back up—steady, sharp, but something unguarded flickered there. Concern. Admiration. Maybe more. She saw what I was becoming, and instead of backing away, she leaned closer.

“You don’t have to carry everything alone,” she said. “Even if you think you do.”

For a split second, I almost said something reckless. Almost let the wall crack.

Instead, I nodded once.

“Live feed,” I said.

Jayla masked whatever crossed her face and turned back to the laptop, fingers flying again. But her voice, when she spoke, was quieter than before.

“I’ve got you,” she said. “No matter what.”

The drone powered on—silent, unseen.

And somewhere deep in the city, a woman who once stood beside Star waited, unaware that the past was finally moving toward her.

We gathered around the screen as the drone lifted, the warehouse lights dimmed so the image could bloom across the monitors without glare. Jayla’s fingers rested lightly on the controls, barely moving, like she didn’t want to remind the machine it was being commanded.

Little Rock flowed beneath us.

Cars moved through intersections in obedient lines. People crossed streets with coffee in their hands. A jogger passed a man unlocking his storefront. Normal life—fragile, oblivious, uninterrupted.

I watched it all with a strange distance, like I was already gone from it.

“Altitude steady,” Jayla murmured. “No detection.”

The image shifted as the drone drifted north, the river cutting the city in two like a scar that never healed.

North Little Rock.

The atmosphere changed the closer we got. Less color. More concrete. More fences. The drone’s optics sharpened automatically, picking up details most eyes would miss—camera domes tucked under ledges, infrared sensors disguised as lighting fixtures, guards rotating positions with practiced timing.

“There,” Jayla said, zooming in.

The building rose into frame—sleek, modern, pretending to be corporate clean. But nothing about it was accidental. Every window angle. Every access point. Every blind spot that wasn’t actually blind at all.

“This place is layered,” Jayla added. “Physical security tied directly into cyber response. Trip one thing, ten others wake up.”

“Fortress pretending to be an office,” Lina said quietly.

The drone slipped closer, threading between lines of sight with impossible precision. It passed through tinted glass like it wasn’t there at all.

Inside, the air felt colder—even through a screen.

An office came into view. Minimalist. Controlled. No personal clutter. No photos. No softness.

A woman sat behind the desk, posture perfect, expression calm. She spoke to someone just off-screen, one hand resting on the desk, the other idly rotating a pen like it was an extension of her fingers.

Mara Voss.

Time folded inward the second I saw her.

She looked older than the last time I’d known her, but not weaker. Sharper, if anything. The kind of person who aged into danger instead of out of it. Her eyes scanned data on a floating display, calculating, always calculating.

“That’s her,” I said.

My voice sounded farther away than I expected.

Asia folded her arms, her gaze never leaving the screen. “She doesn’t look worried.”

“She never was,” I replied. “That was always her edge.”

Jayla zoomed further, isolating the room. “She’s not just guarded. She’s anticipating something. Look at the rotation—security doubled on the west side. That’s not routine.”

“Like she knows the world’s shifting,” Lina said.

Kelo leaned forward, the floor creaking under his weight. He watched the guards pacing below, watched the cameras sweep their arcs.

“What happens when we get her?” Asia asked.

The room went quiet.

Kelo cracked his knuckles once, slow and deliberate. The sound felt louder than it should’ve.

“We stop being polite.”

No one argued.

Because we all felt it—that moment where lines blur, where survival demands something darker than intention. This wasn’t about asking questions anymore. This was about pulling truth out of someone who’d buried it under money, bodies, and time.

I stared at Mara Voss on the screen, at the woman who once stood where I stood now—trained, loyal to no one but the mission.

“Whatever she knows,” I said, “she didn’t keep it clean.”

The drone hovered, unseen, listening.

And somewhere deep inside that building, a woman with Star’s shadow on her past sat unaware that the quiet above her was already breaking.

I geared up in silence.

No music. No chatter. Just the quiet ritual of preparation—the kind that settles into your bones after years of knowing what comes next.

M4 first. The weight familiar. Comforting. I threaded the suppressor on slowly, feeling the metal bite and lock. Checked the bolt. Slid the magazine home. Green laser mounted, aligned, tested against the concrete floor until the dot burned steady and true.

Handgun next. Suppressor. Slide check. Chamber clear, then not.

Fresh plates slid into my vest with a dull, final sound. Ceramic and steel—promises I didn’t intend to test, but never trusted enough to skip. I tightened the straps until the vest hugged me like a second ribcage.

All black.

No insignia. No name. No flag.

Just function.

I was halfway to the exit when Asia stopped me.

She didn’t say my name. Just reached out and caught my wrist, firm enough that I felt it through the gloves. When I turned, she was already close, eyes searching my face like she was trying to memorize something she might not get to see again.

She lifted her hands and turned my face toward hers.

“Promise me,” she said.

Not be careful. Not don’t do this.

Promise.

“I’m coming back,” I replied.

I meant it. Or at least, I needed to.

She kissed me once—hard, desperate, unfiltered. Not a goodbye. A claim. Then she stepped aside, jaw tight, giving me space like it hurt to do it.

I didn’t look back.

Outside, the air felt different—brighter, louder. Too normal.

I raised my hand, pointed at the invisible speck hovering high above the warehouse, and tapped my earpiece.

“Comms check.”

A half-second pause. Then Jayla.

“All clear,” she said. Steady. Professional. But I caught it—the way she held the line open just a beat longer than necessary.

The Corvette growled to life as I pulled out, the engine low and restrained, like it was waiting to be unleashed. I drove without urgency, blending in, counting turns, watching reflections instead of mirrors.

Four miles out, I slid into a narrow alley and killed the engine.

Silence again.

“Climb,” Jayla said.

I stepped out and didn’t hesitate.

Hands found brick and steel instinctively. I scaled the fire escape, vaulted to the next ledge, hauled myself onto a rooftop like gravity was optional. The city blurred beneath my feet as I moved—jumping gaps that would’ve paralyzed normal men, catching edges mid-air, rolling clean and silent.

Broad daylight.

No smoke. No shadows.

Just speed, precision, and the muscle memory the camp burned into us until fear stopped asking questions.

I landed on the vantage point Jayla marked and dropped into a crouch, breath controlled, pulse steady. From here, the city opened up—traffic crawling, people crossing streets, a woman laughing into her phone below.

None of them looked up.

None of them knew.

I scanned the perimeter, angles, entry points—already planning five exits before the first move—

Then Jayla’s voice cut sharp through my ear.

“Jakari—get down. Now.”

Every muscle locked.

Not panic. Not shouting.

Urgency.

“Jayla,” I said slowly, keeping my profile low, eyes sweeping rooftops, windows, sky. “What did you see?”

Nothing moved.

No alarms. No sirens.

Just the city breathing.

Silence stretched—too long.

Then her voice came back, lower this time. Tighter.

“Move,” she said. “Right now.”

The kind of tone that doesn’t explain.

The kind that means something already went wrong.